Anne Applebaum: What USAID's Absence Looks Like on the Ground

Kevin and Rachel and peanut M ⁇ Ms and an eight-hour road trip.

And Rachel's new favorite audiobook, The Cerulean Empress, Scoundrel's Inferno.

And Florian, the reckless yet charming scoundrel from said audiobook.

And his packs glistened in the moonlight.

And Kevin, feeling weird because of all the talk about pecs.

And Rachel handing him Peanut MMs to keep him quiet.

Uh, Kevin, I can't hear.

Yellow, we're keeping it PG-13.

M ⁇ Ms, it's more fun together.

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Hello, and welcome to the Bullworld Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome back one of our faves staff writer at The Atlantic.

Her latest piece is the most nihilistic conflict on earth about Sudan's civil war and how the cuts to USAID have exacerbated the crisis.

Her book, Autocracy Inc., will be out in paperback later this month.

It's Ann Applebaum.

And I got to tell you, I was asking my husband last night, I said, do you have any questions for Ann Applebaum?

He takes a deep breath and sighs.

And he says, no, I don't think I can handle hearing any more bad news from Ann Applebaum.

And I was like, that's sad.

We love Ann Applebaum.

So can you just give our listeners some uplift before we have to hear about famine and autocracy?

Is there anything happening in your life this summer that brings you joy?

So I'm speaking to you from the very deep Polish countryside, and I would like to report that after three years of trying, this year I got my wildflowers to grow.

So I now have a kind of meadow where wildflowers grow and they've killed off the weeds.

So the wildflowers defeated the weeds.

And this is what are the colors of wildflowers in the Polish country?

They're many, many colors, yellow and blue and kind of light violet, and they're very nice.

That's beautiful.

You might want to post.

Do you have an Instagram?

Are you an Instagram?

I have an Instagram and I have already posted pictures of my wildflower garden.

Okay, well, maybe I'm not following that.

I've got a following at Applebomb on Instagram, it turns out.

Okay, wonderful.

We'll check that out.

Now, to real business.

I'm going to spend plenty of time on Sudan at the end because it's interesting and has a lot of geopolitical impacts.

But we do have, unfortunately, some sad home front news we've got to get to on your autocracy beat.

Tim Apple, Tim Cook, CEO of

one of the most successful companies in the world, worth untold amounts of money, is concerned about the tariffs that the U.S.

is going to charge on the equipment and his phones.

He was a little concerned that the Commerce Secretary, Howard Nutlick, was out there talking about how Americans are going to start screwing in the screws on the phones.

So to take care of that, he was yesterday in the White House, and he offered Donald Trump a plaque with a 24-carat gold base.

He says, this is a unique unit of one.

He wanted to let the president know that a former U.S.

Marine corporal who now works at Apple made it.

Congratulations, Mr.

President, he says, as he gives him this gift.

Tom Nichols said these are like the gifts the Politburo members used to give to Brezhnev.

I'm wondering what you think about

these CEOs having to suck up to Donald Trump with gifts.

The idea that politics has become so personalized, that there are no institutions, there are no systems, that the only way you can affect or change policy is by offering a valuable gift to the leader is indeed,

I would say, pretty much contradicts everything that the founders intended when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

So, no,

it's not a good sign.

I mean, people give gifts to presidents all the time, and that's pretty normal, but

you're right.

I mean, an ugly thing with a 24-karat gold base,

you know, designed for no other reason other than to be flattering

is a strange gift.

Yeah.

On live TV

from the CEO.

And it comes in the context of during the same press conference, Trump was taking some shots at Intel.

Their CEO this morning, Tom Cotton, was on Maria Bart Romo's show talking about how the Intel CEO has ties to China.

Our president that watches a lot of cable news

apparently was live tweeting that and bleed it out.

The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately.

There is no other solution to this problem.

So, like, sure, like, people give gifts to presidents and like there's back and forth and a trading of gifts at meetings and such.

But, like, clearly, in this case, what you have here is CEOs of these high-tech companies

feeling like they need to suck up to the president or else they will be punished specifically.

And maybe, who knows, maybe the government will even try to

push out the CEOs or the executives of these private companies if he doesn't like them.

And it is a totally insane, like, banana republic, not a free market capitalist democracy.

And I think that it's intriguing that no Republicans have said anything.

I mean,

imagine Barack Obama trying, you know, saying like, Rupert Murdoch must resign.

There's no other solution to this problem.

You know, the entire

Republican Senate conference would go would go crazy.

But here we are.

If I can do a Soviet analogy again,

one of the reasons why the Soviet Union eventually fell apart was because all these personnel decisions about who should run the company and who should

make economic decisions were political.

And so you got to run the company if you were a loyal party member and not because you were good at running the company.

And you got to be in charge of scientific research if you

could recite Marx's texts forwards and backwards, not because you actually knew anything about science.

And that was the reason why the Soviet economy declined and eventually died.

And

we had two decades of catastrophe in Russia.

So there is a connection between how apolitical companies are, how separate they are from political influence, and their ability to do well.

It's not just kind of ugly and tacky, which of course it is, but it's also, this is the reason why Americans did used to favor the free market because they thought that it would produce better outcomes and that we would become more prosperous.

And so the idea that we now have CEOs afraid for their lives because they might be attacked on X or somebody might make dumb videos about them on TikTok, or God forbid, somebody should, some militia group should stand outside of their houses.

I mean, I think that's all part of this.

It's not just Trump.

There's now a system of pressure.

There are a lot of people following Trump who will do what he says, and they know that.

Afraid is a key word there, right?

Because there is a culture of fear, I think, in boardrooms around the the country where we cannot get crosswise with the leader.

And like, that is a very un-American type feeling.

And it's certainly in my lifetime, I can't really think of a parallel to that.

You know, maybe boardrooms being afraid of, you know, popular uprising against them, of protest, or of, you know, of, you know, people organizing against their brand or something.

But that's, that's the market at work.

It's the market speaking.

Like having us having to care about the feelings of a single leader, I mean, like, does feel like a notable mark towards autocracy that is different from where we've been before.

No.

Yeah.

And of course, the irony

of the situation is that if all of these CEOs worked together, so if there was a, I mean, maybe it's more difficult with CEOs, but certainly in the case of universities or in the case of law firms, you know, if they all, you know, each one of them is separately vying for the attention and favor of the president, if instead, as a group, the tech CEOs said,

you know, screw you, we won't do that, then they would have a lot more power and they would get control back.

But they don't seem to have figured that out yet.

I mean, they seem to each be trying to do a separate deal, you know, on the assumption that they can have a special link to the president.

If they just find the most attractive 24-karat gold item, that they'll have the way in.

When you're dealing with someone who's operating on whims, you know, you can be in his favor one day and out of his favor the next day.

And that's why what you really need is, you know, you need to be dealing with rules and institutions and, you know, things that aren't subject to whimsical change.

And that's what our system created in the past.

And as I say, if tech CEOs were

thinking harder about this and thinking more long-term, then

there would be a group effort and we would see it.

One more note on the autocracy watch.

This morning news from NBC.

Listeners, I remember hearing about Brian Driscoll or the Drizz.

He was affectionately known by his colleagues.

He was this kind of a career FBI agent that ended up as the acting FBI director after Ray resigned.

And Trump and Cash and others, I think Emil Bove was part of this, had demanded that he fire agents who had investigated the January 6th insurrectionists.

The news this morning is he's being forced out of the bureau, according to a source.

Directly familiar.

We talked a couple of weeks ago to to Mike Feinberg, similarly, who was essentially forced out.

He chose to resign because of his friendship, personal friendship with Pete Strzok, who was on Cash Patel's enemies list.

Again, I mean, now we're moving into government service versus a private company, but like the idea that they would push out an agent who is well regarded by everybody in the Bureau solely because

I guess he was trying to defend his colleagues who were just doing their job in a previous administration.

We don't need to keep going back to Soviet Russia, I guess, but there's some other parallels here, huh?

Ann?

The politicization of justice and the politicization of

prosecution and investigations,

all of that also, I mean,

you don't have to go that far away.

I mean, you can look in our own hemisphere, you can look at lots of other places.

That almost always ends badly.

I mean, what you get is instead of justice, you get political revenge and cycles of revenge.

And

the thing that makes me very curious about all this is, okay,

there's a theory of executive power, and there are Republicans who believe the president should be able to do whatever he wants, and he should be able to have whatever kind of FBI he wants, and therefore he should be able to investigate everything.

Okay, that's fine.

Are they prepared for,

I don't know, President Gavin Newsom to have that same kind of power and to use it against them?

I mean, it seems very strange to me that they're destroying institutions and putting in place this very personalized systems that could then be used by anybody for anything.

And I don't really understand what their long-term game is.

Either their long-term game is there won't be free elections or we'll fix the election or we'll steal it or gerrymander it or something, you know, or they're perfectly prepared for someone who they disagree with, who doesn't like them to be able to use those same tools at some point in the future.

And that's the piece of it that mystifies me.

I mean, do they understand what the long-term implications are?

Do they imagine this is something that is only going to be for a year or two, or three years rather, and then it's going to go away?

Or is the plan that they never lose power again?

I genuinely don't know.

Yeah, I think some for probably both for some.

Some there's it's nihilism, it's short-term thinking.

It's okay, whatever, zero sum, we'll fight this out in the future.

But I do wonder that about people with you know, corporate financial incentives, for example.

Like going back to the Fox counterfactual, like looking at how Trump has dealt with CBS and other companies, looking at how he's bullying now CEOs who don't know what they want, does News Corp not think that there won't be pressure on the next Democratic administration to go after them?

I mean, like, they imagine how up in arms they were when Barack Obama, like, one, I forgot what the exact quote was, one time he made kind of an aside about how Fox isn't real news or something.

I forgot the exact quote was, but, like, let me tell you, Sean Hannity remembers the quote because he talked about it like for years afterwards, right?

I don't know that anymore they will be able to you know just wager on the fact that if the democrats get in power they will be restrained by their own commitment to norms or impulses or or weakness or whatever like i think that there will be a lot of pressure on the next democratic president to go after people that you know uh that have been complicit in this up to and including like corporate executives and

the precedent will have been set for it the president will have been set and also there will be support for it in a way there didn't used to be you know there you know nobody wanted even Joe Biden to go after Fox.

I mean, there was no discussion of that or mention of it.

But I really feel that

the half of the country that doesn't vote for Trump, and it is half, I mean, it's whatever it is, 49.1% or something, if that becomes 50.02%,

then it's a different group of people now and they will see the world differently.

And I'm not saying that's good, but it seems to me like a political fact that it's very strange that the Republicans who are supporting this transformation don't see it.

I'm also not saying it's good.

It seems inevitable, I guess, is my point.

And it seems like they've laid the groundwork for it.

I think folks are familiar with my kind of on-again, off-again concern about the neighborhood cat that I've quasi-adopted into the home at the behest of my child and husband, kind of against my will.

It was kind of my fault, though, because I was stuck on a work trip during the largest snowstorm in 400 years in New Orleans.

And so,

you know, we've got Aretha to deal with.

We've got the cat.

And even though I'm kind of lukewarm about the whole thing, you still feel like an owner.

You still want to make the cat happy.

And so I got to tell you, when you came back from California this week and I saw the cat sitting there on the front porch waiting for its smalls treats,

you know.

I felt pretty good about that.

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A couple other things around the world before you get to Sudan.

We've got the reciprocal tariffs finally went into effect today for most places.

Some of the steepest duties include Brazil at 50%, Syria at 41%.

I don't know why.

Laos and Myanmar, 40%, Switzerland, 39%,

Canada, 30%.

It's a really meticulous system we've got here.

India's at 25%, subject to go up to 50 later this month, though.

There's an executive order about that last week because the president can just kind of wave his finger now and do this, apparently.

Vietnam, Taiwan, 20, EU, Japan, South Korea, 15.

I'm curious your view.

We did the economics of this yesterday with Josh Barrow, but just like the geopolitical

impact of this or thoughts and kind of what you're hearing from folks around the world.

So if you think this doesn't affect other areas, you know, defense cooperation, willingness to work with the U.S.

on other issues, support for the U.S.

and other things that it cares about,

then you're very wrong.

And once again, I think what's really disturbing to a lot of people, I heard a lot about Switzerland actually in the last couple of days, is the whimsical nature of it, you know, that it doesn't seem to be about any logic or process.

It's what the president feels like.

And, you know, Switzerland is an interesting country.

It has a rotating presidency.

The president is one of the members of the cabinet.

And if you're the president of Switzerland, you're just not used to thinking that way.

Like, they just can't think that way.

You know, they think in terms of institutions, and you send someone to negotiate, and the negotiators deal with other negotiators, and there's a process, and at the end of the process, there's an agreement.

And apparently, they were completely caught by surprise by this very high tariff because that's not what their negotiators were saying.

But I don't know, maybe I genuinely don't know the reason.

Maybe Trump doesn't like Switzerland or there's some watches, chocolate

thing against the chocolate.

Skiing, maybe.

I don't know.

I have no idea.

Trump would look kind of silly in a skiing outfit.

So maybe it's something about that.

It's aesthetic.

We're literally at that level of speculation.

That will have all kinds of repercussions.

I mean, who's going to want to have any other kind of agreement with the United States?

I mean, do you want to have any kind of long-term investment in the United States or any kind of you know, agreement about anything else, any political deal, anything the U.S.

wants to do If the U.S.

has a conflict with China or it wants to anything, it means that people are going to be wary of dealing with such a capricious and unpredictable power.

I mean, there are also some tragedies here.

There was a very good article in the New York Times a few days ago about Lesotho, which is a very, very small African country, which for no reason at all

had a very high tariff put on it.

Well, that's because we have a trade deficit with them, is why.

They have one industry.

Right.

They have one export industry.

They export some textiles to the United States.

That's it.

I don't think they can buy that much.

So it's not like there's so many options.

And the article was about the devastation that this tariff had wrought in that economy because suddenly people were nervous about investing in Lesotho and companies that had deals suddenly dried up.

And

there's been a kind of panic there.

And just this idea that by throwing a number onto a chalkboard or whatever it was, he showed up you know the first day and and by mentioning numbers in the air you know it's almost like you you know you have this on the other side of the planet there's this huge reaction and people lose their jobs it's very disturbing also for no reason like we're gonna make the textiles in america that lesotho is making like it's it's it's just just preposterous well so how many how many textiles can lesotho be making and that you know that are somehow you know in competition with us sorry about that i love that that's kind of an old-timey ring there.

It's actually

an old-fashioned phone and nobody ever calls it.

So I don't know why it just rang.

But anyway.

That was kind of charming for me, actually.

No apology necessary.

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Let's move on to Ukraine.

So Witkoff, I guess, was talking to Putin, former real estate guy, buddy of Trump's.

Trump bleats this.

My special envoy, Steve Witkoff, just had a highly productive meeting with Putin.

Great progress was made.

Exclamation point.

Afterwards, I updated some of our European allies.

I thought that was the most encouraging part of the bleat, that he still thinks that there are allies.

Everyone agrees this war must come to a close, and we'll work towards that in the days and weeks to come.

There's some discussion that a Trump-Putin meeting could be as early as next week.

Russia was indicating that.

Russia also is indicating they are not

likely to be a trilateral talk with Zelensky.

So what do you make of the latest in these conversations?

So there's one really important point to make, which is that President Putin has never said that he wants to end the war, and he has also never given up on his main goal.

And his goal is the destruction or the subjugation of Ukraine, the removal of Ukrainian independence, maybe the replacement of the Ukrainian government with a pro-Russian government, maybe the incorporation of Ukraine into some Russian empire.

It doesn't matter.

He's never said that he doesn't believe that anymore.

A few days ago, very quite recently, within the last few weeks, he said once again something he said before, which is that everywhere that there has ever been a Russian soldier could be part of the Russian Empire again.

So that includes Berlin, where of course he was a representative of the Soviet Empire, and it includes the Baltic states, it includes Poland, it includes lots of places.

So he is still using that kind of language.

Also, within the last couple of weeks, RA Novosti, which is a Russian state kind of news agency, published an article saying that the end game of the war in Ukraine is that all Ukrainians should be killed, you know, destroyed.

So they aren't letting up in either in their public rhetoric, either in what they're saying to Russians, or in what Putin says.

And so that makes me fear that they aren't prepared for any kind of real peace.

I mean, it is possible, okay, that the Ukrainian air war, which gets, for reasons I'm not clear about, doesn't get that much attention in press news.

So this is Ukrainian drones that hit Russian refineries and create these very satisfying explosions that people then pass around on social media.

Apparently that has been doing a lot of damage.

You know, they've hit refineries, they hit defense plants.

There was that famous moment a couple months ago when they hit a bunch of airplanes on an airfield hundreds of miles from Ukraine.

And so maybe Putin is suffering from that.

There's some talk.

Maybe he wants some kind of air truce.

It's true that his economy has lots of trouble.

Maybe he is looking for some kind of brief pause.

But unless there's a

Russian acknowledgement of Ukraine's right to exist and Ukraine's right to have its own country, then really the war is not over.

And so I still haven't heard that.

I'm still waiting for that moment to come.

So the Times has an article out this morning.

I'm interested in your reaction to it about their analysis of this, because I think it's maybe slightly different than what you just said.

They said Putin's overarching goal is primarily to secure a peace deal that achieves his geopolitical aims, not necessarily a certain amount of territory.

And Trump's best position to deliver on those aims, which include keeping Ukraine out of NATO and preventing the alliance's further expansion.

Do we think that's what Putin's aims are?

I don't know.

What do you think?

I mean, Ukraine wasn't in NATO before.

And NATO has expanded since the war began because Sweden and Finland joined NATO.

And so I don't think this has anything to do with NATO in that sense.

I mean, the issue for Putin isn't Ukraine being in NATO.

Ukraine has never actually been even close to being in NATO.

What bothered Putin about Ukraine, first of all, just the idea of its independence, because he doesn't recognize it as a real country.

Secondly, the fact that Ukraine had this democracy revolution in 2014 that led to their then pro-Russian sort of autocratic president fleeing the country has bothered Putin a lot because that's the kind of revolution and that's the kind of language that he is most afraid of in Russia.

You know, there was a really interesting moment a few days ago.

You may remember that Zelensky passed a law a few days ago that would have taken away the independence of Ukraine's anti-corruption institutions.

And then there was a big protest in Kiev and, you know, and lots of noise about that.

And then actually Zelensky reversed the law.

There was an interesting comment from Russians saying, criticizing Zelensky for having given that up.

In other words, the fact that Zelensky is, you know, even during wartime and even during martial law, still has to respect public opinion and is still the leader of a democratic country where people have free speech.

This is a problem for Putin because, you know, if Ukrainians can have that kind of a democracy, then why can't Russians have it?

They are historically close and they have been part of the same empires before and they are intermarried and a lot of Ukrainians do speak Russian.

So for Putin, Ukraine is an ideological problem.

NATO is a kind of tertiary thing.

Ukraine

has never been even close to being in NATO.

So that wasn't why the war started.

And to make that argument is to accept their propaganda.

I mean, certainly it's possible that if Putin did ever want to end the war, maybe he would accept that as a kind of fake condition.

But I would still be wary of it.

As I said, until the Russians recognize that Ukraine is not Russia and won't be, then I don't think the war is really over.

That's an interesting update on the corruption thing, because we had Frank Quinn Foe, your Atlanta colleague, on

Times a Flat Circle.

Was that this week or last week?

Last week, I think.

And we were talking talking about that.

We were kind of talking about how it was a bad judgment call initially from Zelensky.

It's interesting.

I had not heard that, that after he backtracked, that that became kind of a talking point in Russia.

Could you just expand on that?

Like basically them making the argument that

he's weak or like what was there?

Yeah, like he's a beta.

Yeah.

Putin's idea is that any institution inside Russia that is not dependent on him is a threat.

And that includes, you know, any kind of real opposition, any kind of independent media, any kind of independent organizations.

I mean, even non-political organizations, you know, historical organizations, for example, I'm quite close to one that was forced to shut down.

This is a memorial,

any kind of cultural organizations.

So it's very close to the old totalitarian idea.

Everything is controlled by me, and everything that's not controlled by me is an enemy or some kind of CIA plot.

And the idea that in Ukraine there could be independent anti-corruption institutions that have the ability to investigate the government is anathema, you know, because of course for them, you know, corruption is part of who they are.

I mean, it's part of why they rule.

Russia is a state which is where the economy is partly designed to benefit the people who run the country.

And the people who run the country all have two hats.

You know, they are on the one hand, political figures, and on the other hand, they are, you know, they have deep, sometimes control of companies or investments in companies.

The Russian economy is the same people who run it.

There's no distinction between the distinction we were just making a few minutes ago between CEOs and the president.

I mean, there isn't a distinction like that in Russia.

And so for them, the idea that there's an independent anti-corruption institute is, I mean, that's terrifying, you know, because an independent anti-corruption decision would find Putin to be corrupt in five minutes.

So, you know, of course they're against that.

I mean, independent anti-corruption decisions have their problems.

I mean,

they can misfunction and so on.

That's a longer conversation.

But of course, they're intolerable and unacceptable in an autocratic state because it means that the leader who is making money from politics would be exposed.

And of course, the other thing that's typical and

maybe essential to autocracy is secrecy.

You know, they don't want people to know how much money they have or how the system really works or where the money is invested.

And they're against transparency and they're against accountability and they're against all of that.

And that's the essence of their system.

And of course, to the degree to which there are elements of that kind of secrecy creeping into our own system, we should be worried about those too.

And that's why it was important, actually, in a lot of ways.

Zelensky changed course on this, right?

To like send a signal of differentiation.

I haven't been there and I don't know the graphic details of exactly why it happened.

But yeah, it is important that he changed.

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The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.

Okay, let's do Sudan.

Before we get into kind of the micro about what is happening, you've been there there twice.

My eyes were tired last night, so I listened to this story.

It was a very lovely British lady that was doing the reading and then looked at the just really,

I was about to say wonderful, but the photography is wonderfully done by Lindsay Adario.

But,

you know, the pictures are pretty gruesome.

But before we get into like the details of Sudan, you kind of broaden it out to this bigger point about how Sudan is what the end of the liberal world order looks like.

So let's talk about that in the macro and then we'll get down to the details of the conflict.

Yeah, this is a subject I've written about in other places and at other, you know, you can write about it in the context of Russia and Ukraine and

other places of Israel, actually in Gaza as well.

But, you know, in Sudan, it's particularly dramatic.

So in Sudan, you have a place where the state has effectively disappeared.

There's a civil war.

They're basically parts of what used to be the Sudanese military are fighting each other.

And there's a long history to that,

which I can explain if you want.

But the state has disintegrated.

And all around Sudan, there are these outside powers who have an interest in how this war goes or making money out of it or selling weapons.

And that includes an amazing array of states.

I mean, so the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris, the Turks, the Egyptians, the Russians are there.

The Russians are there on both sides of the war.

The Iranians are there.

There's some Islamic groups that they support.

Actually, the Ukrainians are there.

And that is to me almost one of the most interesting pieces of the story because, of course, they don't care.

They're not supporting either side or helping either side.

They're there to find and kill Russians.

And that tells you.

That was like the most interesting side quest in the story

when I got to that.

I had to pause it, rewind.

I was like, wait, what?

Yeah, the Ukrainians are just going after the Russian militants, I guess?

Yeah, because the Wagner group, remember this kind of Russian mercenaries, they were fighting on one side.

Now they appear to be helping the other side as well.

So that's another piece of the story.

So you have all these groups who have an interest in prolonging the war or helping one side, or a lot of them are interested in gold.

There's a lot of gold in Sudan.

Some are interested in other resources.

Saudis have land investments in Sudan.

And so what you have is a kind of, you can't even really call it a proxy war.

I mean, it's an anarchic free-for-all.

And some of it uses, you know, there are old ethnic conflicts and old, you know, lines of conflict in Sudan that have been there for many years.

But now they're amplified amplified and juiced up by all these outside powers, you know, by drones, which are cheap and widely available, and by other kinds of weaponry that is much more lethal than what was available even 10 or 15 years ago.

And so you have that situation.

And then what you don't have is any outsiders, any framework, any UN negotiators, any

appointment from, there is theoretically, technically actually there is somebody who's appointed by the Secretary General of the UN to be a negotiator there, but he's almost never there, and he's a ghostly figure.

And what you also don't have is Americans.

You know, we had a little bit during the Biden administration, towards the end, the last couple of years, they had an envoy there, but it's actually been a decline over a decade of American interest, kind of both diplomatic interest and other kinds of interest in Sudan.

humanitarian interest.

I mean, there was a moment, and I remember this actually rather well, when Darfur was a big cause in the United States, and the Janjaweed, who have now evolved in something called the Rapid Support Forces, who are one of the halves

of the Civil War,

people understood that they were trying to commit genocide in Darfur.

And actually, American evangelicals were very interested in Sudan because the southern part of the country is Christian.

It's now broken off.

It's now a separate state.

And the United States was actually part of that process, negotiating that and

so on.

And I'm not going to say that U.S.

efforts were always amazingly successful.

I mean, obviously, they weren't, or the war wouldn't have started again, but there was U.S.

interest and engagement.

And now, of course, there's nothing.

And so the UN is gone.

Europeans have cut back.

The U.S.

is invisible.

And so what you have instead is these middle powers who have financial or transactional interests.

And so you have no, by liberal world order, I mean the UN charter, you know, the idea that there is, you know, countries' borders have some meaning, that there are rules of engagement in international economy, all that.

That's all gone.

None of it's visible there at all.

And what you have is a kind of chaos and you know, a war that one of the reasons why I think we find it hard to understand the war is because it doesn't seem to be, it's not like there's a good guys and bad guys, or you know, one side is for, you know, left wing or right wing.

So could you just explain the sides?

Because it is a little, it's pretty murky.

It's murky because essentially

there's more than one, more than two sides, rather, but they're there are two main groups, and one of them is the Sudanese Armed Forces.

And this is a, you know, this has been effectively the Sudanese Armed Forces has been running the country for many decades in different formats.

And then the other group is the Rapid Support Forces, who were affiliated to the Sudanese regime and were actually created by their previous dictator.

And they're the thing that used to be called the Janjaweed.

And they were a group of originally based on nomadic Arab tribes who fought with and tried to ethnically cleanse the

farmers, so-called African farmers who spoke different languages, non-Arabic languages in Western Sudan and Darfur.

And they were at one point together, and now they're fighting one another.

So there's no ethnic, that's what I was trying to get at.

Like, is there an ethnic

difference between those two groups?

There are, but it's not just about that.

I mean, it is sort of people from the western part of the country against people from the eastern part of the country very roughly.

But a lot of the fight is about control over gold or control over territory or, you know, who should be in charge of this region or that region.

It's not a war where there is a kind of clear ideology or even clear ethnic divisions.

It's really just about power and control.

And I think that makes it hard to understand and hard to feel sympathetic with anybody.

And it also is part of the explanation for why

it's so destructive.

I mean you have mercenaries fighting, actually more mercenaries are fighting on the RSF side.

And the mercenaries

are often unpaid and they seem to have been told by their commanders, you can steal whatever you want, and that's your payment.

And so, you have this kind of massive theft also going on during the war and people being robbed.

And Khartoum, which had a, you know, there was a middle-class part of Khartoum.

I stayed in a kind of middle-class suburb of Khartoum when I was there.

You had people living middle-class lives, or people had some wealth accumulated.

There were places where we saw kind of piles of washing machines that had been stolen out of people's houses and were, you know, the RSF didn't have time to take them away when they retreated from the city.

So there's an enormous amount of theft as well.

I mean, on both sides, there are kind of underlying conflicts.

There are ethnic groups in the western part of the country that have always been neglected and so on.

But it's really that if you look at the, you know, I ask a lot of people, you know, are the leaders of either side concerned about civilians?

You know, do they care about this immense civilian suffering?

You know, 14 million people displaced, something like half the population will go hungry at some point this year.

Most children are out of school.

Do they care about that?

And several people said to me, no, we don't think they care.

And then, as I said, fueled by these middle-sized powers, the war continues, and it's simply nihilistic and destructive.

And the U.S.

is nowhere to be seen, and the UN is nowhere to be seen.

But the other thing worth saying is that the Sudanese themselves

continue to ask about the I mean, I think, why was I there?

Why did they let me in?

I partly because they want Americans there.

I mean, they had this idea that you can tell, you know, we could get America interested if we give you, and people said that to me.

And, you know, they would, people would ask about why was America gone?

And this is even before we've got to the question of aid.

It's just about diplomacy.

You know, and so there's a maybe it's not even realistic, or maybe it's based on some kind of false memory of what Americans used to be.

But there's an idea that Americans used to be able to come in and negotiate and have enough power to get get people to sit down together, and that's, you know, doesn't exist anymore.

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There's a lot there, just on the U.S.

side.

You know, there's part of me that says, okay, well, I mean, obviously, I agree with this premise about just how brutish life is without, you know, a liberal world order.

On the other hand,

this has been happening in Sudan for like a quarter century, back even when the U.S.

was doing more, right?

And so I do wonder, like, what, is it like appreciably worse?

Like, Like the U.S.'s absence is notable.

Like

you gave one example that was pretty heart-wrenching about a doctor who was

talking about how he wasn't wasting food because he'd heard rumors that whatever Trump and Elon Musk were worried about waste, which is pretty sad.

So I guess I just wonder on like on both points, like was it meaningfully different when there was more of a whatever international Western order there?

And what has changed?

Some people who've read the piece have had the same comment.

I mean, so there have been moments when U.S.

intervention helped.

We did help end a previous civil war, this kind of North-South civil war.

You know, we did help create South Sudan, which hasn't been a huge success, but it was a way of ending that conflict.

So we have had, you know, we, and we, I don't mean just the United States, I mean U.S.

and others, and the UN and others.

Separately, and I haven't talked about this yet, I mean, U.S.

aid to Sudan, so provision of food, this is not democracy promotion, this is not any,

you know, anything beyond provision of food and humanitarian aid has been hugely important, not just into Sudan, but also the helping Sudanese refugees who are all over the region.

And that was something that we have been doing for a long time, and that did matter.

And the absence of that is already noticeable.

And so one of the things to remember about USAID is USAID was about, just humanitarian aid, I should say, was about 40% of the world's humanitarian aid, but it was a lot of the, even more, maybe 90% of the logistics.

So, all kinds of things like trucking contracts and statistics and payment systems.

A lot of that was run by USAID.

And remember how USAID was ended?

It was ended from one day to the next.

You know, people were thrown out of their offices.

They were told they couldn't have access to their email.

You know, they didn't have access to the payments systems.

They couldn't reach the people they were supposed to be in touch with in Egypt or wherever.

And I talked to people who had had that experience.

So this very abrupt, disastrous, kind of catastrophic way that it ended without any form of handoff meant that all over, you know, all over the world, actually, but certainly all over Sudan, there were these very abrupt shifts and disasters.

So there's one part of Sudan where refugees are coming over the border because there's a battle in a city called El-Fasher, and they're coming over the border.

And when they cross the border into Chad, they find almost literally nothing.

Like there's supposed to be UNHCR there, that's the refugee organization, but they don't have enough trucks, they don't have food, they don't have people, and you know, and the people who are there are about to lose their jobs because their contracts end, you know, in this month or next month.

That's directly because of the U.S.

cuts, even though I think technically UNHCR wasn't supposed to be...

I don't think people who worked there thought of themselves as being dependent on USAD, but the way the system worked, the U.S.

was so important and so central that the whole thing falls apart.

And yes, I talk about the doctor who had a hospital full of malnourished children.

And these are very tiny babies who are extremely weak, and their mothers who are very weak.

And in order to, they can be saved, and you can save them with these nutritional supplements, some of which are made in the U.S.

And the doctor I met there, this very young, articulate doctor, who said, who was explaining to me, you know, we are really careful about how we use it and we don't waste it and we only give it to, and I thought, oh my God, you know, this is a this is a man who deals with starving children every day and he feels like he has to talk about not wasting food I mean it was for me it was very embarrassing and I think I talked about this on your show once before there were other things too there's a one of the really positive things about Sudan if you want if you want me to say something uplifting is that one of the things you do see is a lot of the Sudanese have begun to organize themselves.

There's a movement called the Emergency Response Movement and they create these soup kitchens that then raise money and help feed people.

And so, you know, when everything disappeared, when the whole infrastructure fell apart and the government disappears and there's no international groups there, what you do still find are these local organizations.

But some of them, even some of them, were getting their food from sources that, unbeknownst to them, turned out to have some USAID funding.

And so, you know, we would go to a soup kitchen and they would say, well, we used to give people food five days a week and now it's down to three days a week because we don't have enough.

I mean, literally, they're giving them bean soup.

And so we're talking about pennies, you know, a few dollars.

You know, that's what

does a handful of beans cost that they aren't able to get, you know, because of these cuts.

And the kind of criminal carelessness of it really comes home to you there.

I mean, it wasn't like they said, okay, this is an over too big an institution and we're going to reform it and fix it.

No, you know, they had to destroy it or put it in the wood chipper or whatever it was that Musk said he was doing and

take its name off the building and make everybody go home.

I mean, you know, some of it is still supposedly functioning and some of the people I talk to still think have their jobs for the moment.

But the repercussions of that carelessness will be felt for a long time.

And as I said, in really one of the poorest places in the world.

And that also the Sudanese find just inexplicable.

Nobody understands why.

I mean, what do I say?

I can't explain it to them.

Well, you know, we've got a, the vice president had to go on a rafting trip and a boat trip in in ohio and we had to raise the river you know because it was a little too low so we had to make sure the water in the river was higher and then we spent 50 million on trump's golf trips so you know that we got you know priorities are pretty important those folks you're talking to just i just really quick want to have you share some of those stories and you're in khartoum I can't imagine how you like have will to go on kind of if you're in Khartoum.

I mean, your point about the U.S.

is

it's sort of this adding insult to injury, right?

It's like nobody cares about us.

Like both sides of this conflict don't care about us.

It's kind of a conflict about nothing, really.

I mean, except power and money.

And then, you know, the folks that were doing this minimal amount to help make sure we didn't starve, they don't care about us anymore.

And you're talking about how you're there and, you know, there's still life happening, you know, like regular life in Khartoum happening.

But then you go to another, you know, there's a bombing in another part of town, you know, and

they're pulling dead people out of whatever buildings.

And,

the folks who you're able to talk to,

how do they go on, I guess, is my question.

So

you meet amazingly idealistic people or people who say,

this is my country.

I will help as long as I can.

There are still people, I mean, it's funny.

I mean, without having read,

I don't know, James Madison or John Locke, I mean, you still hear people say, I can imagine a different future for this country.

You know, I can imagine, you know, some system of power sharing, you know, where we weren't fighting, you know, or don't even need to use the word democracy, but some more peaceful way of doing things.

You know, I can imagine the rule of law.

And there are people who still think it's worth trying to build that.

And there have been moments in the past, even in the past few years, where it felt like they were getting closer to something better.

And they stay there.

I mean, obviously, some people leave, people who can.

Of course,

the other thing is that some people can't leave.

I mean, they just don't have the money to leave, or they don't have anywhere to go, or they have family members to take care of.

But it's always been amazing to me, and this is true in other, lots of other places I've been to, how

human beings can still be inspired by the idea that they can make their country better, or they can do something better, or

they can imagine something that's more just and more fair, and they're willing to try to build it.

And I have met

people in the Russian opposition, I have met people in the Iranian opposition.

I have met these Sudanese who are on the ground.

And even in places that seem completely hopeless, you find that people are willing to do that.

And that continues to be, for me, it's a kind of miracle that I keep uncovering in different parts of the world.

And I'm not going to say everyone does that and there are plenty of people who are selfish, as I say, but there are always a core of people who are willing to keep trying.

Well, the story is really striking.

Folks should go read it in the Atlantic because there's a lot of other details in there.

I guess I should also say it's not Sudan, it's South Sudan, the country said we, you know, sort of helped cleave off.

But the one amount of policy that the U.S.

is engaging in right now with Sudan is we did send some migrants who were not from South Sudan to South Sudan.

as part of some deal where they want the the one of the leaders, I guess, to get off the sanctions list.

So like, this is what we're doing now.

Like rather than providing the plumpy nutch or whatever, we're like sending migrants from other places to the region.

That was a horrifying story.

They now figure only as some kind of useful

place where we can use, they have a prison that we can borrow.

I mean,

that's it.

It's just crazy.

Okay.

Last thing.

I think unintentionally, actually, we have

a little Ann Applebaum book club happening because in the last two times you're on, on, one time you mentioned The Captive Mind, which is kind of a book, Polish book about the mindset of autocracy and fascism and how it warps people's minds and behavior.

And then you mentioned the Oppermans, which is a fiction book about Nazi Germany and, you know, kind of

a Jewish family living in Nazi Germany.

It's like it was astounding.

I read that on vacation.

I did Oppermans and then I did Gay Romance.

You know,

I got a little bit of both when I was on vacation this summer.

But so do you have a third book?

Do you have a a third book you could recommend for us?

I've now done two.

I just read a great novel, actually, a fairly new novel, called The Director.

And it's about a Nazi film director who goes to, it's based on a true story, who goes to Hollywood, fails, and goes back to, sorry, he wasn't a Nazi, he was a German anti-Nazi film director.

He goes to Hollywood, then he fails, and he comes back to Nazi Germany.

And it's about what that's like.

It's very good.

It's by a German writer called Daniel Kelleman.

It's been translated in the last year.

I will check that out.

That also is relevant.

We definitely have some failed people in our administration who have decided to go MAGA, who were not MAGA before.

The vice president, for example, but many more all the way down.

That is actually the subject of it.

I mean, it's different contexts and so on, but it's very good.

It's about how do you readjust.

And Applebum, I appreciate you so much.

It's a wonderful story and I appreciate the work that you're doing traveling over there and keeping us informed.

And we'll have you back again soon, I hope.

Thank you.

Everybody, I'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork podcast.

Peace.

Lately, I'm hard to manage.

Rest with me on Sabbath.

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Fruits and juices, all that you desire.

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You can be yourself for me.

Hold me up, hold me.

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You go have to check your fall later,

wait later.

Not that fear I want you.

The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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